1. Technical Field
This disclosure generally relates to electronic design automation. More specifically, this disclosure relates to methods and apparatuses for generating a memory-efficient representation of routing data.
2. Related Art
Performing routing on a circuit design is a computationally intensive process which can take several days to complete. One of the problems with performing routing on today's large circuit designs is the size of the routing data. Specifically, in conventional routing techniques, the routing data for an entire circuit design usually cannot be stored on the physical memory of a computer system.
One approach for overcoming the size problem is to load only a portion of the routing data on physical memory and keep the remaining data on the disk. Unfortunately, the overhead associated with transferring data between physical memory and disk significantly degrades performance. Hence, it is generally desirable to be able to store the entire routing data on physical memory.